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Telco Startup Weave Announces $5 Million Series A Funding

Weave, a telecommunications startup located in Utah, has announced Series A funding totaling $5 million, targeting small and medium size businesses (SMB) and is initially going after the dentistry market. Notably, according to tech news site Tech Crunch, Ronny Conway and Mark Valdez, who both previously worked at Andreessen Horowitz, are helping to fund the company through their new venture capital firm A Capital.

Weave CEO Brandon Rodman spoke to Tech Crunch about the latest round of funding and his impetus for starting the company. Rodman, who is also a co-founder of Weave, said the company is expanding its customer base by approximately 30 percent every month. The company was in business for two years before joining Y Combinator, a company that provides seed money for new startups, and has seen acceleration since that time. Indeed, in addition to A Capital, Y Combinator joined Homebrew, Fuel Capital, Ron Conway, SV Angel, and Initialized Capital in this first round of funding.

The company started out with 160 interested clients, and now it services greater than 600. All of Weave's clients are dentists, reports Tech Crunch. Weave reportedly installs Polycom (News - Alert) IP phones and delivers software that integrates with CRM and EMR products companies already have in place.

The Weave website says its services replace dentists' current phone providers; it replaces them with unlimited lines, unlimited long distance, and unlimited local calling. The Weave dashboard, accessible on mobile phones, lets any dentist call and text his or her patients from that central locale and syncs with existing software to pull up his or her patient's data when patients call into the office.

Rodman said he helped design a previous startup that worked with dentists and allowed them to schedule appointments. That previous model lead directly into the concept of Weave, and now Rodman and his associates help those same types of clients use their databases of customers to sync up with their phone systems. Weave tries to make customer service easier by placing his clients' contacts in the same locations as their phones.

To do that, Weave has had to cater to small- and medium-size businesses in ways that work for them. Often, telecommunications products fit larger businesses well, but they have a hard time scaling down. Rodman reportedly had to engineer his own APIs to allow Weave's products to sync with the CRM/EMR software dentists already had in place.

Now, with the recent influx of capital and a set of business models and APIs under its belt, Weave is attempting to expand to other SMB markets that have similar needs to those it sees in dentists' offices.